Hi...first time "caller"

I've been butting heads with a problem for about a week now.
For a while I've been running a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) off a 4 GB Kingston DataTraveller Flash Drive. Using partimage, I've managed to install this Maverick Ubuntu and load it with Audio Stuff from UbuntuStudio....plus wineasio and some Windohs audio software, then save the images of the partition usb stick (win32 livecd partition and casper-rw persistence partition).

I've also done the same thing with a linuxaudio distro called pure:dyne. I restore and use either according to my needs.

Obviously 4GB isn't a lot of space....so over the holidays I went out and bought the 8GB version of the DataTraveller. Two weeks later I'm still trying to get things to work right.

The problem is that when I create the casper-rw partition and boot into Ubuntu things slow to a snail's pace. Ubuntu takes over 5 minutes to boot up. Installing anything with Synaptic or whatever takes 5x as long as with the 4GB version of the flash drive. Everything works rather well....although multitasking is laborious, if possible at all.

At first I thought it was the usb-key itself. After returning it (twice) I realised this just wasn't the case. 3 different flash drives had performed exactly the same way.

Googling around over the last few days I found I'm not the only one to come across this problem...but still no solution.

What makes things weirder (and why I decided to ask for help) is that today I installed pure:dyne on that same stick and it works perfectly...running as smoothly (almost) as from a normal harddrive. Weirder still is the fact that pure:dyne is built from ubuntu itself...the only difference (as far as the whole usb-creation business goes) is that the persistence file/partition is named "live-rw" instead of "casper-rw".

I'd settle for pure:dyne...except it's built on "lucid" not "maverick"....two of my 3 computers have graphics driver issues with pure:dyne and the soundcard support is spotty (which is strange for a distro specialising in audio production) and wine (and therefore vst/i support) is not nearly as good.

If anyone has any clue what goes on here I'd be very interested. In the meantime I'll run pure:dyne on the one computer that likes it.

Thanks for your time.

Most likely ubuntu has more running processes at startup.
I have Debian Squeeze and Ubuntu on my machines and Ubuntu takes a while to load.

That doesn't explain why certain things, like installing linux software, take many times as long in Ubuntu than in pure:dyne....nor why the exact same distro is 10x slower in some things on a 8GB flash than on a 4GB one (which I'm running now BTW....and it is flawless)
Installing Windoze software on either is as normal.....no delays whatsoever.

The way I understand it, whenever there is a program/wallpaper/file on the persistent filesystem that supersedes or conflicts with those on the read-only system on the squashfs image, it is given priority. This process should be relatively seamless, and is as long as the combined file-systems don't surpass a total of 4GB. After that, some kind of conflicts emerge between the two. Some oddness with the win32 filesystem on the first partition?

In fact...other strange things occasionally do show up....with the gtk theme suddenly reverting to it's ugly default. Or the icon theme magically doing the same thing, only to be restored after a logout.

The weirdest thing is if I try to create a new user. Any file I save, folder I create in the new user will disappear immediately, only to be reborn after re-login. I gave up on that right away .

A real head-scratcher for me.

Thanks for your response

May I add that after a decade of running Linux and hoping for a distro that could be a platform for a DAW that rivals Windows, and that can use Windows VST/i's as if they were written for Linux....this dream has finally come true. Maverick is a wonderful OS (I am running it on my main computer)...Wine has certainly come a long way and I couldn't be happier with the results.

With ubuntu just for me to log in on a machine that I have Debian Squeeze & Windows, which load fine, I can't do a normal startup with Ubuntu. I think it maybe the graphics, because I had to disable compiz-fusion just to get past login window.
I'm just saying you might want to change startup programs to not start until after login.